Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope

KIRSTEN ELLIS

Dedication

For Michael and Nathanielandthe Stephan sisters, Rania and Wafà

Epigraph

Dayr, the Lion of the Desert, to Hester, the Star of the Morning, sends greeting, with love and service. Those who obey the sabre of Dayr, hold the Great Desert in the hollow of their hand, even as the ring encircles the finger. Warriors without number, horses, camels, powder and shot, what is required … all is ready. You need only to send your orders.

Your true friend, Dayr

DAYR AL FADIL, Bedouin Sheikh of the Anazeh, To Lady Hester Stanhope

If you were a man, Hester, I would send you on the Continent with 60,000 men, and give you carte blanche and I am sure that not one of my plans would fail.

WILLIAM PITT THE YOUNGER, Prime Minister of England

The Arabs have never looked upon me in the light either of man or woman, but un être à part.

HESTER LUCY STANHOPE

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Family Tree

Maps

Prologue

1 Beginnings

2 The Minority of One

3 The Company of Men

4 A Summoning of Strength

5 Love and Escape

6 A Bolt-hole on the Bosphorus

7 Indecision

8 Friendships

9 Under the Minaret

10 The Desert Queen

11 Separation and Despair

12 ‘The Queen Orders Her Minister’

13 A Chained-up Tigress

14 ‘I Will Be No Man’s Agent’

15 The Broken Statue

16 Revenge

17 ‘I Am Done With All Respectability’

18 Mr Kocub’s Spy

19 The Sun At Midnight

20 Djoun

21 The Mahdi’s Bride

22 The Last Dance

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Notes

Copyright

About the Publisher

Lady Hester Stanhope’s Family Tree

Maps

Prologue

It was four o’clock on Sunday, 23 June 1839, the second year of Queen Victoria’s reign. Far away from England, on a hill in the shadow of Mount Lebanon, only the hum of cicadas stirred in the suffocating afternoon. The white stone walls and roofs of a house – as high and formidable as a small fortress – seemed to hover in the heat-distorted haze, above a handsome grove of olive trees. Round about there were other hills and ridges, crisscrossed with terraced fields, and gashes of that same chalky, porous stone. In the distance, bells pealed from the tower of a monastery; perhaps the only hint of what a European might recognize as kindred civilization. These hills were renowned as ancient cemeteries for the Greeks, Romans and Phoenicians, their warrens of tombs crammed with sarcophagi and hidden treasures invisible to the eye; superstition had allowed them to remain undisturbed for centuries.

Amid clouds of dust, half a dozen household servants scurried along the dirt path leading down to the village of Djoun, bringing with them a skittish collection of mares, donkeys and goats, the sturdiest saddled with hastily-packed bags and whatever furniture could be lashed into place, such things of value they hoped would compensate for unpaid wages. A boy clutched a red leather-bound book filled with strange divinatory symbols he did not understand.

In her bedroom with its stone-cut windows, the woman they called Syt Mylady was dead. Her open eyes stared straight ahead. A white turban was bound tightly around her skull-cropped grey hair. Incense smouldered in an earthenware saucer and candles had burnt to waxy stubs. She had died in the house which she had first glimpsed more than a quarter of a century earlier, not realizing then that it would become the one true object of her ambitions. How the light had glittered and danced about her then! Light, which she craved as a young woman, light that was exhilarating and alive under a cobalt-blue sky.

For the last seven years she had remained within her fortress walls, leaving her private quarters only to walk in her garden whenever it pleased her, at any hour of night or day. She would visit her mares, rest her hand on their warm flanks as they slept, or lie under her bitter orange trees, scrutinizing the constellations.

Now her body lay on coarse Barbary blankets, on a low-slung bed that was nothing but five planks nailed together, tilted slightly to incline her head. She was dressed in her customary night-dress – a chemise of cotton and silk, a white, quilted abaya and with a striped pale red and yellow keffiyeh tied under her chin, the way she had learned from the Bedouin. Her fingers still gripped a crooked staff with a naïve carving at the top shaped to resemble a ram’s head.

In death, her features – which were those of an old woman, for she died in her sixty-third year – seemed to soften. Her face was very pale and gaunt, making what some had affectionately called her famous Chatham nose look even more pronounced. This was the same unmistakable nose that had perched defiantly on the faces of four generations of Pitts before her, including not only two of England’s most outstanding and powerful Prime Ministers, father and son – both wartime leaders – but also ‘Diamond’ Pitt, her great-great-grandfather, curmudgeon of the first order and maker of the family fortune. It was his ability to thrive in an alien country, and by a combination of boldness and tenacity to rise from the rank of humble merchant, firstly, by founding a trading concern which grew formidable enough to rival even the East India Company, and later, to be Governor of Madras. She often used to say it was the blood of this Pitt that ‘flowed like lava’ through her veins.

Yet of all her relatives, aside from her mother, it was her grandfather, Pitt the Elder, she resembled most as she grew older. Indeed, by the age of fifty, she could have been his female incarnation: the same large, almond-shaped blue-grey eyes, with their direct, contemplative gaze; the refined oval face and high forehead.

These last few nights she had dreamed such living dreams. Herself, strong again, with all of her youth and boldness restored. Visions, half-dreams, half-memories from a time long distant, came to her. Footsteps echoed down familiar passageways, but this time she recognized them as the impatient, joyful steps of her younger self. Voices called to her, chided her in the old, loving ways. In sing-song French and Arabic: ‘Ne verse pas des larmes, ma chère et belle marquise …’ and in English.

There she was again at Walmer, standing on the drawbridge in the sunlight near the shore, laughing after her straw hat as it blew away, her long dark chestnut hair like an aureole, and her blue dress billowing, a vision so unrestrained that the red-coated soldiers turned to stare. She had the ears and the heart of the Prime Minister. ‘Oh, Hester,’ he would say, with the tender exasperation he reserved especially for her. Not the love between father and daughter, or brother and sister, but something possessive all the same. Their secret language when in company, much of it conveyed implicitly by the eyebrows and in sideways glances, gave no clue to the paroxysms of laughter they shared later in private. What could she not have achieved, had she set her mind to it? Before, when every expectation and anticipation she held of life had not been disappointed.

On Friday, she wavered from her appointment with death, and sent one of her men down the hill with orders to bring back the first European doctor he could find. She seethed, knowing that an Italian doctor – ‘that useless Lunardi’ – was at that very moment hurrying on his way to return to her service, no doubt hopeful that the fee for this voyage, as well as the large sum owing on his earlier ministrations, would be reimbursed upon his arrival. Unable to eat, and barely sipping water, her coughing became worse, and with each attack, blood poured from her mouth. She acknowledged defeat, too weak even to pull at the hemp rope within her reach, attached by an apparatus of pulleys to a large brass bell. She ordered only that the candles be kept constantly lit in the whitewashed alcove at her bedside, so she could watch the flames. That night the moon and stars were clear, and she could smell the breath of jackals as they prowled beneath her window. Did she fear death then? Many believed her fearless. She believed in the divine, in the transmigration of souls – that she herself was marked for greatness. She had looked death in the face many times, and fancied she could see it written in the faces of men, and so could judge their fate.

Now Lady Hester Stanhope lay dead, and all that she had been was gone. Her garden would be left to run wild – the arbours of yellow jasmine, fountain pavilions and her favourite archways of periwinkle with its bright blue flowers – and her splendid house would be left to rot and crumble, the bricks themselves to melt back into the earth. Her hill would become no more than a place you might climb for a better view of the sea, as it was when she came.

It was not until ten o’clock the next night that two strangers could be seen making their way up the hillside to the house, their torches bobbing like fireflies, their horses stumbling at the steep incline. A guide from the village walked alongside, fearful in the darkness of snakes, wild boar, jackals, wolves and even panthers. The journey had taken the two men more than ten hours of hard riding. It had fallen to the British consul in Beirut, Niven Moore, to investigate the death of Lady Stanhope. She was, after all, granddaughter of the Great Commoner himself and the niece of William Pitt, even if she had placed herself beyond the reach of reasonable society in such curious and remote circumstances. He had asked an American missionary, the Reverend William McClure Thomson, a man well liked by the British community in Beirut, to accompany him and conduct whatever funeral service they could manage.1

Moore was already well acquainted with the affairs of ‘Her Ladyship’. He was in glum possession of a dispatch box of documents bristling with notarized seals thrust upon him by her numerous creditors. It was said that not only had Lady Hester Stanhope descended from bankruptcy to penury – patronizing moneylenders all the way up the coast from Sidon to Tripoli, with escalating debts in half a dozen currencies – but was now quite mad. Gossip about her was as commonplace in the Beirut souk as in a Bath tearoom. Of all the young Victoria’s subjects in this part of the world, he mused, she was surely one of the most problematic. Or at the very least, notorious.

Nothing had deterred her, not travelling at sea during the Napoleonic wars, not riding through deserts of warring Bedouin, nor the threat of assassination during civil war in Syria, a semi-barbarous country at the best of times. Who could resist speculating about the lovers she had entertained in her fairytale fortress, about the way she presided like a chieftain over her raggle-taggle band of servants, about what fate befell those whose throats she had threatened to have cut, in her make-believe kingdom, with its dungeons and secret passages. Many times she had sheltered refugees: Arabs, Jews, Armenians and Albanians who fled to her after the siege of Acre, and scores of panicked Europeans after the Battle of Navarino. It was true that for a time she was more like a warlord than a woman, and she had hired her own army of Albanian soldiers. Had not the wily Mehemet Ali, ruler of Egypt and her erstwhile friend, grumbled: ‘The Englishwoman has caused me more trouble than all the insurgent people of Syria or Palestine.’

It was said she was like Scheherazade and could transport her listeners to other worlds. To all those of a certain age who heard her talk, it was impossible not to think of her grandfather, the greatest orator that England had ever produced. Was she so notoriously vain that she met her guests only at dusk and by candlelight, and in some cases, let them see only her hands in the gloom?

When Moore first arrived in Beirut, he had anticipated a cordial summons to the Chouf mountains. He was even disposed to do what he could to assist her with the horrible state of her financial affairs. Indeed, he opened the first letter from her with something approaching elation. Instead, he was stung by her reply, for she treated him like a peon. Her pension – granted by the King himself for her services to the country – was to be confiscated in order to pay her debts, a move that would render her worse than penniless.

Her defiant letters – one to Lord Palmerston, another to the Duke of Wellington, and the last to Queen Victoria herself – were published in The Times. The latter was generally held to be, as one wag observed, ‘the letter to a Queen from a Queen’.

But the Queen had other matters on her mind, including her own coronation. War appeared inevitable, with campaigns in both Afghanistan and China, and then there was the looming Eastern Question. She had no wish to indulge an old relic who had been a favourite of her grandfather’s and certainly not one who had made the mistake of addressing her with such familiarity.

Many in England were sympathetic, especially those who had come to think rather fondly of Lady Hester as something of an institution, but mostly because her well-publicized exploits and grandiose foibles had never failed to provide amusement over the decades. Mothers would warn their daughters they must not be too headstrong or they too might end up as unfortunate a creature as Lady Hester Stanhope. She hardly set a proper example, even for young women wishing to broaden their horizons through travel. She was altogether an exotic from the Romantic era, which to current taste was overblown, dissolute and even vulgar. Simply put, for the Victorians, she was out of fashion.

As they approached, Moore and Thomson were taken aback by the imposing appearance of the house. Two gateways with heavy wooden doors were flanked by high walls which encircled a residence of seemingly indeterminate size. There seemed no way to make their presence known, aside from hammering their fists first against one door, then the other. ‘No one met them: a profound silence was all over the place; they lighted their own lamps in the outer court.’2 It seemed to the men that passages branched off in all directions. They had the sense of becoming trapped in a maze. As they went on there were glimpses of other inner courts and pavilions linked by vaulted arcades, as well as those along the route they took. One seemed particularly grand, sheltering a liwan, a hall open to the sky, lofty and gracious with rows of cushioned divans and a trellis of climbing roses and jasmine. Although this house was not as grand as the grandest Damascus mansion, it was something else entirely: whoever had created it had the soul of a magician. They also began to be aware of large numbers of restless cats beneath their feet, curling around their ankles and clinging to their boots. A young African woman appeared in the passageway, and made a gesture towards a thick red door.

In a room with green walls, stripped of all furnishings, they found the body of Lady Hester.

Moore was slight and handsome with a moustache and sidewhiskers which he kept neatly clipped, but which nonetheless he worried at constantly with his fingers when under strain, as he did now. For this event, he had been careful to wear a black armband and dress in sombre colours with a high stiff collar. ‘It was an intensely hot Sabbath,’ Thomson would record. The idea of a woman’s corpse lying here for over a day in such unbearable warmth made him nauseous. Sweat dripped from his temples and soaked his jacket. He did not wish to investigate further.

Behind the men, a small tribe of servants had assembled. Decisive action was required. There had been thirty-seven servants in the fortress in the morning. They had watched ‘every motion of her eye’ until she died. Most had taken what they could and fled. Now, some ten or so remained. Moore noticed that many of the servants seemed to be wearing what he surmised to be cast-off robes and hats from the wardrobe of their mistress. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw that their ragged clothes were incongruously matched with brilliant velvet and brocade cloaks, red turbans, silk stockings and carpet slippers.

By midnight the men had ascertained several facts. Although she had left no written instructions, it was clear that Lady Hester had managed to convey how she wished to be buried. At least five of her servants professed to be expert on the subject, and one in particular had apparently been entrusted with duties he had sworn on his life to carry out. This was her most trusted servant, Almaz – her dragoman – who combined the roles of translator, secretary, gardener and general factotum.

They decided to do as she had apparently asked. Lady Hester was to be buried in a grave at a specified place in her garden, which already contained a vault, along with the bones of a Frenchman by the name of Loustaunau, who had been buried there before. ‘The vault in the garden was hastily opened and the bones of General Loustaneau [sic], or of his son, I forget which – a Frenchman who died here … were taken out’ and readied for burial.3 How he had died and why Her Ladyship commanded this posthumous mingling, which Moore regarded as immoral, it was difficult to say. Such an indelicate request on the part of this spinster might be best left out of his report.4 He would have to decide whether or not it would be necessary to mention this detail when he informed the ladyship’s younger brother. A more chaste companion had been intended for the burial ceremony: the jaunty square of the Union Jack flag which he had brought for the purpose, folded away in his saddlebag. A roll of white muslin would do as a shroud. The vault would be opened and its contents were to be arranged according to Lady Hester’s instructions. Reverend Thomson would perform the Church of England service.5

Despite the heat and disrepair, the garden impressed the men. Thomson would later describe it as ‘a wilderness of shady avenues, and a paradise of sweet flowers … I have rarely seen a more beautiful place’. They left the dragoman to open the vault and arrange its contents according to the instructions Lady Hester had given him and returned to supervise the removal of the body into its waiting shroud, and its placement into the plain wooden coffin they had brought with them from Djoun. The carved staff was clasped between her hands. After draping the Union Jack over the open coffin, they followed the procession of her servants bearing her aloft, threading their way through the passageways and out to the garden. Thomson wrote of the macabre sight awaiting them: ‘When at length I enterered the arbour, the first thing I saw were the bones of the general, in a ghastly heap, with the head on top, having a lighted taper stuck in either eye-socket – a hideous, grinning spectacle.’6 The servants were clearly no less taken aback. They stood aside, respectfully, as though this arrangement had a dignity of its own. Moore stared in shock at the open vault for some moments. There was nothing to be done except to conduct the funeral as rapidly as possible.

The next morning, after a rough night, overhearing shouting between the squabbling servants, who were anxious about their unpaid wages, the men went around the premises to make an inventory of Lady Hester’s assets. They had not been the first to inspect her Djoun fortress, for as soon as news of her death had reached Sidon, the British consul there, a wealthy Maltese Jew by the name of Joseph Abela, had immediately hurried up in order to prevent her house from being ransacked. Abela had ordered the more valuable-looking furniture and possessions to be piled up together in rooms which he had sealed up.

They counted thirty-five rooms, not including the cellars or the stables. Thick curtains were draped across the windows, but the light was just bright enough to see tables, chairs and chests, all inlaid with mother of pearl; cushions in Aleppo silk and bright woven carpets; bolts of calico, brocade and linen; large brass lanterns, damascene glass and brassware; and carved, painted wooden doors off their hinges, rich in geometric star patterns. There were stained-glass windows, blue and white Mameluke jars, and large circular pewter trays. One room contained countless letters, some filed, some heaped at random, and papers of esoterica scrawled with strange diagrams and notes in a language Moore surmised to be Hebraic, as well as boxes of books. Another was filled with more than forty oil jars, but they were all empty, and spiders nested between them; in still another, there were enough Arab saddles for a small army. Two more were crammed with medicines – a madwoman’s pharmacopoeia of phials, pills and powders, with medical almanacs and instruments of all descriptions. A store-room contained shelves of stacked boxes, some of whose contents were emptied out: cases of Promethean matches, silver snuff boxes, a few prized canisters of tea and jam from Jermyn Street, candles, Epsom salts, watercolours of English soldiers on horseback, a portrait of the Duke of York, green umbrellas and English gunpowder. There were a great many narguileh and tchiboque pipes. They speculated as to how many of the ladyship’s most valuable possessions had been stolen the previous day.

When Moore opened the closet in what he assumed to be Lady Hester’s dressing room, out spilled models cut in paper of rooms with arches, vaults and pavilions and buildings, and fountains, all scrawled with her comments in the margins. Gradients, plans for borders and paths and notes for unusual trees and shrubs. He found himself admiring the determination of this singular woman, cutting out shapes with her scissors, studying books – designing, building and furnishing her mansion of dreams – so far from home.

1 Beginnings

She came into the world with a shock of chestnut hair and bright, greyish-blue eyes, blinking at the watery sunshine that came slanting in through frosted windowpanes. It was Tuesday, 12 March 1776, a clear, chill day in London. That morning, Handel’s Messiah was being rehearsed at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden; a short distance away in Hanover Square, J. C. Bach was preparing for his performance the following evening.

It had been one of the coldest winters on record; the Thames had frozen over, and the city was blanketed by great drifts of snow. At the first hint of the child’s arrival, Lord Mahon, Charles Stanhope (the future third Earl Stanhope), sent urgently for a trusted doctor. By the standards of the day it was considered an easy delivery.